Smarter Government: Analytics to Outcomes

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In times of economic uncertainty, smarter government is a mandate. When information can be analyzed and presented more effectively, the result is better decision making, reporting and insight. New collaboration tools enable governments to transform relationships with citizens, creating an environment where efficiency and management by performance are the norm. IBM can help you governments become a smarter government.

Could Watson Help You?

Watson is the only computer on the planet that can answer a Jeopardy! question in less than three seconds - fast enough to beat the world’s best human players. (For those of you that missed the match click here to see a video clip.)

Watson was optimized to tackle a specific challenge: competing against the world’s best Jeopardy! contestants. It does this by sifting through large amounts of unstructured information to find potential answers and assigning a confidence measure to each potential answer. When it has high confidence in an answer, it will buzz in and offer the answer. Beyond Jeopardy!, IBM is working to deploy this technology to businesses and governments dealing with the information overload problem.

At work, few of us are like Ken Jennings, able to instantly answer almost every question thrown at us - - with an 80-90% success rate. There is simply too much information and more information is coming in all the time. Whether we’re in finance, HR, IT, or another area, our success at work depends upon dealing with huge volumes of information, sifting through it to find the “good information”, and then using the information to make decisions to do our job.

One Idea for Government

In discussions recently with some of our military colleagues, they came up with numerous ideas for deploying Watson-like technology. They cited the problem of “request overload” - - dealing with all the requests for Predator and similar UAV missions. How could they deploy their limited resources to best effect? Another person mentioned the problem of sifting through all the intelligence information – most of it in the form of unstructured information formats such as video and text – to find the relevant information to a mission they were planning. Another discussed the problem of monitoring their “situational awareness” and how hard it was to keep track of all the data coming in. “Could Watson help monitor our security posture and alert us to potential threats?” asked another.

Now It's Your Turn to Take on Watson

Those are just a few examples from the military and intel communities, but I'd imagine there are hundreds of potential applications for Watson to streamline government information processing. So now it's your turn:

Do you handle massive amounts of information at work?

How would you use Watson to sift through it?

Don't feel comfortable sharing publicly? I'd be happy to hear your thoughts directly as well ([email protected]). For more information on Analytics, I'd also invite you to see our website: http://www.ibm.com/ascdc

It's interesting that you posted this. We are in the process of looking at "Natural Language Processing" (NLP) for assisting us with issues in our own organization around diving into documents that have "hidden" data. Specifically, there are a lot of incoming documents that we get that have associated data to internal processes that up until now can only be worked within visually, or through generalized word searches. In the next year we are hoping to fix this issue and allow us to build a better internal knowledge database using "hidden" or "trapped" data contained within these documents. I look forward to seeing more discussion on what others are doing with (NLP) application in their own organizations.

You have a similar situation to what we ran into with Jeopardy! So much of the information is in unstructured content - - how do you make sense of it? how do you get value out of it? We had to use rather sophisticated NLP approaches to parse each sentence and gain understanding, but as you saw during the Jeopardy! match with Watson, it can be done, the technology works.

In a spin on the military applications of Watson's technology, I think a great application would be a real-time "mission control" for NASA's space exploration missions (think "HAL" in 2001). If Watson were onboard and an astronaut itself, the crew wouldn't have to wait for the scratchy message to get back home to find out if that dilithium crystal should be kept at 100 degrees F or C.

Chris, that is a great use case for Watson like technology. NASA and other organizations have so much organizational knowledge that is not being utilized for access reasons like you described (disconnected ops, disadvantaged users), but also because it is so darn hard to find information. I would bet NASA like other organizations does "lessons learned" exercises but how much of that information ever gets reused? Is there a way a smart system like Watson could help our people better use institutional knowledge?

As far as I understand you are correct. We are actually going to use the concept of NLP for searching blogs, social media and associated data sources for related information to our internal agency business processes. I just didn't emphasize that because I thought I would wait for input from others.

I have seen these presentations in the past from IBM, and though good I would ask one thing; that the presenter touches on what exactly "Natual Language Processing (NLP)" is from a concept standpoint and how IBM is implementing technologies that do this. The talks tend to not give the details on the theory and thus end up being protrayed as theoretical use case ideas for the Federal departments rather than talking about the basics. Most workers in the Federal community don't even know what NLP is and how it could benefit them for multiple uses.

Our Seminar next week is designed to provide an overview of the Watson technology rather than be an introduction to Natural Language Processing (NLP) and how it can be used in Federal. I'll see about organizing something along the lines you suggest for our fall Analytics Seminar Semester. Keep the ideas coming....